dir. Wayne Wang

My mother and I were both surprised by the vehemence of the fight we had after we saw Working Girl when it came out in 1988. I was indignant, with all the self-righteous power of a nouveau feminist, that a girl couldn't get recognized for her brain without vacuuming in heels and lace undies; my mother kept insisting, "But it's a Cinderella story," as if that mitigated anything. Cinderella, of course, was a gentleman's daughter forced to act as a scullery maid, whose essential nobility was outed by her fairy godmother; Jennifer Lopez's Marisa, who is actually a maid, is similarly smart and (ethically) noble, which is why Ralph Fiennes' rather limp conservative-but-big-hearted politician falls ass over teakettle for her when he sees her in borrowed finery (her inner nobility therefore outed by a Dolce & Gabbana suit). But Maid, while pretending to tell the truth about class distinctions, depends too hard on the pretty American fiction that such distinctions are only a matter of money--which of course we have to humanistically believe, otherwise we'd be, uh, British. And the escapism wouldn't be escapist, would it, if it were suggested that Fiennes was just having a little yen for something exotic and fiery outside his stuffy, insulated world. (Lopez's new single offers another take on class mobility--"Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got/I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the block"--that seems closer to the truth, but still not quite true. What the hell is it about class in America that we don't want to say? Why do we talk around it with movies like this?) That said, it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be; Lopez and Fiennes have almost no chemistry at all, but they're pretty graceful about it, and the presence of Bob Hoskins, Chris Eigeman, Amy Sedaris, and Stanley Tucci has got to count for something. Doesn't it? EMILY HALL

Analyze That

dir. Harold Ramis

Listen closely to the sound of my voice: 10 seconds after this film is over, it will disappear completely from your memory. Even though it was much funnier than you hoped it would be, you'll only remember how hard you laughed when Billy Crystal drooled sushi all over the table. Actually, you'll forget it even without hypnosis, because Analyze That, the second film about the shenanigans of an anxious mobster (Robert De Niro) and his nebbishy shrink (Billy Crystal), is inherently disposable. High prince of hack humor Harold Ramis gives us barely enough story to keep the film from disintegrating in a hail of expensive junk. De Niro, imprisoned at the end of Analyze This, is released into Crystal's custody; Crystal tries to get De Niro to go straight. Luckily, Ramis still has a good joke or 10 left in him, and the starving story leaves ample space for heaping helpings of union-made Hollywood comedy. Weighty subjects (grief, redemption) occasionally distract from humor mainstays (kicks in the balls, sushi), but at least the writers didn't stick a love interest in the way of the gags. Lower your expectations with a couple of beers and you've got an enjoyable evening of middlebrow fun. MATT FONTAINE

Culture Jam: Hijacking Commercial Culture

dir. Jill Sharpe

Thurs-Fri Dec 12-13 at the Little Theatre.

Ultra, the Northwest Film Forum's series of anti-consumerism documentaries, continues with this well-meant, well-made, but essentially amateurish and cheerleading look inside the world of "drive-by cultural criticism." The one-hour video features three practitioners of the art of creative rebuttal, each of whom represents a different facet of performance protest--from beautiful absurdism to wince-worthy credulity.

San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front is an inspired group of yippie vandals who deface, or reface, public advertisements with ironic slogans--changing a cigarette billboard to read "Am I Dead Yet?" etc.--and revel in the quixotic nature of their quest. They change the signs, a bunch of people see them, then the owners change them back. In Toronto, we meet Carly Stasko, a "Media Tigress," who teaches classes in culture jamming and posts stickers with epigrams like "enjoy debt" and "the product is you" on cash machines and fast-food drive-through windows. Stasko also raps about freeing one's mind from the enslavement of advertising; and while she really means it, she's as compelling as a college sophomore who just found out that the government is bad.

Next up is Reverend Billy, a theater actor in a priest costume who leads his "Church of Stop Shopping" into the Disney Store in Times Square and demands that people boycott Disney for its sweatshop labor practices. Billy is the most troubling subject--not because what he says isn't true, but because he's an insufferable fame wraith, with one eye forever cocked, looking for a camera. The billboard liberators are by far the most entertaining of the lot, not just because their art is the best (though it is), but because they seem to be the only ones, filmmakers included, who get the big picture. One would like to think we can all agree that advertising is an affront to taste and language, but we can't. One would like to think that we will all rise to the challenge of reclaiming our portion of the corporate "mindshare," but we won't. When "Jack Napier," the spokesman of the Billboard Liberation Front, asserts that "there is no free speech anymore; it's all bought and paid for," he may be clever, but he's wrong. Still, he's right on the money (as it were) when he says, "If you don't believe they're going to put a Nike swoosh on the moon, you obviously haven't been paying attention to what we're capable of as a race." Somewhere in between these two statements lies the challenge and the responsibility of the culture jammer. Unlike its narcissistic counterparts, the BLF recognizes and embraces the noble futility of its efforts, subverting the eyeline monopoly of advertising the best and only way it can: temporarily and anonymously. SEAN NELSON